Damon Stapleton: Advertising. What if nothing is changing?
A blog by Damon Stapleton, chief creative officer of DDB New Zealand
“Creativity doesn’t wait for that perfect moment. It fashions its own perfect moments out of ordinary ones.” – Bruce Garrabrandt
There is an advertising urban myth about a company needing to sell more baby powder. Basically, all the brightest and the best would come into a room each day and try and brainstorm how they could sell more baby powder. They would look at communication, distribution and pricing. At the end of each day a cleaner would come in and clean up the room. While she did this she would listen to what they were saying. At the end of 3 days very little progress had been made in selling more baby powder. The cleaner could see everybody was a little crestfallen so she gave them her idea.
Why don’t you just make the holes bigger?
The question is always how you change the game. And the answer is usually made up of two words. Creativity and simplicity. You will find these two qualities in any answer of value.
However, changing the game and talking about change are of course two very different things. One of the funniest things in our industry is to watch people take on the cloak of the grim reaper. One of the safest positions you can take in our industry is that everything is about to die. This has been said every year since I got into the business. Bob Hoffman wrote a brilliant piece about this phenomenon in Cannes recently: https://campaignbrief.com/bob-hoffman-dying-at-cannes/
In it, he shows how speaker after speaker talks about how we are all dying if we don’t adapt. Or, how advertising is dying. Or, that massive change is on the horizon. Run for the hills. For the love of God, we have to change. Otherwise we are all going to die. Now, of course if you get to the end of these talks you will find most are selling something. And nothing sells quite like impending doom.
I guess the real question is what is changing and what isn’t. The idea of change has always fuelled our industry. The restlessness this brings is a good thing. But, it can also be a false prophet. So, I thought I would look at all this through the lens of an excellent article I read recently. For me, it highlights the fact that in the end we always come back to the need for creativity. That is what never changes. It is almost always the solution you return to over and over. And more importantly, it’s how you change the game and make giant leaps when everything else eventually gives you parity.
The article is by Jay Patisall in Forbes magazine called The Cost of Losing Creativity. Please do yourself a favour and read it. https://www.forbes.com/sites/forrester/2019/06/19/the-cost-of-losing-creativity/#2f061d79703a
In it he argues that the industry has commoditised brands and homogenised experiences. Here is what he had to say about how customer experience has become too similar to make a difference.
The issue is that the work looks, feels, and behaves too similar. The industry obsession for meeting every customer need and want for ease and convenience by using technology has left little room for creative differentiation. That has come at a cost. The front door to your brand is a web or app experience that is virtually indistinguishable. Fashion experiences look the same. Quick-service restaurant and coffee apps allow you to order ahead and skip the line. All airline apps allow travelers to check in, manage travel, and use a mobile device as their boarding pass. What can make one brand different from another when the experience is built from the same common technology platform, designed to solve the same user or category need, and programmed for the same two devices? Creativity.
In other words, there comes a point where through technology or just about anything else, you reach an experience plateau where everything becomes the same again. You and your competitors become the same again. And then, you have to differentiate again. For that you need ideas. You need creativity to change the game. It would seem as long as there is competition or choice this will always happen.
Take television and content. Recently, Disney and NBC have taken their content back from Netflix. The game is changing and to be fair there are many scenarios that could play out in the future. But just for fun, let’s take this information and run with it. Disney (I believe the app is called Disney Plus) and many others could soon have their own apps that consumers will be able to access in a variety of ways. This means in the future you could have a multitude of apps or platforms on your screen. And hey presto we are back where we started. Not unlike today with a multitude of television channels to choose from. What was once radically different will become familiar again. This cycle is far more true than radical change.
So, the question becomes how will all these streams of content differentiate from each other? My guess is a few people in a room trying to come up with ideas. No matter what labels are used or what impending doom men in cool trainers tell us is about to visit, this always seems to be the answer.
It is ironic that the one thing that actually creates change, doesn’t change at all. Creativity.
It knows eventually it will get the call after all the talking and posturing is done. It knows it is the only architecture that will let you leap again and again.
Just like the holes in the baby powder, the answer is always staring us in the face.
9 Comments
Thanks for the great read Damon. “We’ve commoditized the brand and homogenized experiences.” This has definitely trickled down to the post production arena where scored music is getting used less and licensed tracks have become the norm. Leaning in on the creative cache of musical artists comes at a creative cost and in the long term it will become the industry’s double edged sword. It’s natural for me to say this as a composer, but it’s becoming obvious that the ‘value’ of licensed tracks has started to feel like a commoditized and homogenized branding experience.
I agree, Damon.
The problem is, it seems that right now, we’re caught on the arse-end of the cycle rather than the good side of it
One hopes everyone in Advertising has done Marketing 101. You’ll remember Product Life Cycle then. What if advertising is at the end of its life cycle?
@groucho
but digital platforms like facebook, instagram, youtube, podcasts, etc are moving TOWARDS and advertising model, not away from it. Because no one can make their stuff for free forever.
If I had a dollar for every time someone said ‘advertising is dead’…I wouldn’t still be working in advertising.
But I am. Which means that they’re wrong, right?
Nothing stands still and regardless of technological change brands need to emotionally engage with new generations wanting to be different from the ones before. Creativity is how you achieve this. Been interesting seeing how large consultancy businesses have struggled to harness creativity. Process refinement and consolidation are quite different from getting a new generation to like your brand.
Were those mythical creatives permitted to leave their gaol I men agency, they would have the benefit of observation. Overlords like wassisface from Clems need to spend less time forcing creativity and giving his unworthy minions more freedom to get out and observe the people we are trying toi sell to. In other news, at AD&D a campaign flagged for the holy graphite pencil failed because of its poor depiction of women. Advertising is changing and can change faster if creatives are allowed genuine freedom to explore every angle of their audience and the product they’re tasked with flogging.
Id say theres a few things going on here.
1- clients have bent over all the agency suits and threatened to fist them so suits do what they are told. Like let clients direct the tvc from behind the split. Let them hover over laptops and art direct while creatives sit back and nod ‘ yes sure we dont want to lose our jobs so lets make every single prop the same brand cue colour even though it looks fuckin stupid’
2- the fundamentals of creativity get slowly eroded to nothingness through repeated surveying and research that is pointed toward conservative results.
3- budgets have been torn apart by the insistence of clients to maintain share dividends to fat rich pricks sitting in offices who couldnt give a shit about anything other than the bottom line.
4- in reality , no-one outside of advertising really knows or gives a fuck about what we do. The ‘craft’ as we call it is purely trade based and quote based outside a few very rare examples and the way to win a job is to increase your asset delivery more than the next person rather than back a solid and considered idea.
5- we are in an advertising recession.
6- anything that any commentator says is generally wrong as they for some reason, think advertising exists outside of the real world economy. How important do you think ideas are when the world is governed by egomaniac dictators? We are another slave to the economic forces that shape everything.
Its important we realise our jobs are incredibly trivial and that advertising is probably dead if you compare it to life before internet.
Just get out there, enjoy whats left of the perks and make some fun of your time.
ECD
We live in a lemming-esque world. Regardless of reality, if a thought or movement gathers enough momentum, it will become powerful. Shares and financial stocks are often backed on perception rather than reality. Businesses are funded on perception rather than reality. All fashion and popularity is often gained through perception rather than reality (ask the Logie organisers).
In the most ironic of ways, it is advertising and mass communications that have made perception the victor over reality. And now, advertising itself is finding itself on the wrong end of the stick.